The majority of IT organisations in the US expect to recruit more staff in the next year but they believe any growth will be modest.

The best place to look for a new job is the financial industry with 63 per cent of firms expecting an increase in IT staff. Among these firms 22 per cent expect to increase numbers by more than 10 per cent.

Gartner's annual "IT Market Compensation Study" is based on surveys from 160 organisations which cover 48, 586 IT staff.

The survey found IT staff enjoyed a 3.5 per cent increase in budgeted base salary in 2005, up 0.3 per cent compared to last year.

The positions firms find hardest to fill are: project management, web applications programmer, security analyst, database administrator and network engineer. The most sought after skills are Peoplesoft, J2EE Microsoft.Net, Java, Oracle, Visual C#.Net, SAP, XML and XML Web Services.

More on Gartner's press release here.®

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